


what could be more intimate than sharing a life?

by lesbianmelodrama



Category: Crashing (UK TV)
Genre: Domestic Bliss, Fluff, M/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, all is well, basically fred and sam's lives after they leave the hospital: an omniscient retrospective, sam dyes his hair magenta, they are nice to a cafe worker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 13:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20836223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianmelodrama/pseuds/lesbianmelodrama
Summary: Together they made each other better people; it was the stuff of romantic comedies.The kiss at the hospital changed everything. Long gone were the days of coy flirtations, hidden passion and denial.Two months after the hospital had been torn down, he and Sam were living in a real flat (though it was not much nicer than the hospital had been).





	what could be more intimate than sharing a life?

Fred was the type of person who liked to know what was going to happen. 

Whenever he read a book he would always read the final page first if only to let himself know what he was getting into, and he was often led to the Wikipedia of a movie before watching it, keenly devouring each morsel of information in the hopes that knowing would protect him from any emotional harm. He liked to have a schedule for each day and stick to it, knowing how long he would work, when he would eat, when he would inject his insulin.

He didn’t hate the unexpected, on the contrary. The past few months around Sam had proven the opposite. He allowed himself to be taken off on impulsive ventures, buoyed by the knowledge that Sam would be there to help him if anything went wrong. That was the caveat; Sam or someone else he trusted had to be there in order for Fred to assure himself that if things turned bad, with his diabetes or otherwise, there was someone there to put things back where they belonged. Nevertheless, he felt much more secure when he could mentally tick off the events of the day as they happened. 

Because of this, the day they found out the hospital was going to be knocked down, Fred found himself caring less and less where he ended up. Sam had asked him to go with him - to stay flatmates - and that was all that mattered. 

Even before the fiasco that happened later on, and even before Sam had kissed him in that gurney, soft and light, a square of warm light illuminating the floor of his mind like sunlight through a window early in the morning, Fred knew that he and Sam would end up together - not necessarily romantically, but that they were tied in some inexorable way.

The thing about Will was that, while he and Fred had a good time together (or at least they did until Will’s true nature betrayed itself), they didn’t need each other. With Sam it felt as though every piece of himself that he revealed resulted in Sam pulling from some hidden depth of himself a matching puzzle piece to join to Fred’s. No matter how confusing Sam became or how tired of his seemingly unrequited love Fred grew, he would always be able to turn back to these connections and see something shared, the foundation of something he could never have imagined. Together they made each other better people; it was the stuff of romantic comedies.

The kiss at the hospital changed everything. Long gone were the days of coy flirtations, hidden passion and denial. 

Two months after the hospital had been torn down, he and Sam were living in a real flat (though it was not much nicer than the hospital had been). Each day began with the sacred daily ritual of walking, hand in hand, to the little Armenian bakery on the corner of the street, where they both would drink coffee (they devilishly enabled each other in this caffeine addiction, co-conspirators once more), and on Friday mornings which Fred had free, they would order these little custard-filled donut-esque things called Ponchiks and Sam would try to catch them in his mouth after throwing them in the air, his eyes gleaming mischievously as they always did when he knew that he was embarrassing Fred in public. He could never catch them and they always ended up with little pieces of dough all over their table and the floor, and although Fred was never actually all that embarrassed, he would always put on a show of rolling his eyes just to see Sam glow at the fact that he was tormenting him. 

After a few weeks of this, Fred walked past the bakery again taking a stroll on his lunch break at work, and saw behind the chipped canary-yellow lettering on the window the girl who was always behind the counter, sweeping up their mess, little hairs flying out of their precarious knot and her knees fully bent, crouching in what seemed a very uncomfortable position. A pit of guilt grew in his stomach and the next Friday they came in and made a mess he demanded (gently) that she show him where the dustpan and brush were. He cleaned it up himself, taking pleasure as he often did in the regularity of his brushstrokes, the fall of the crumbs into the belly of the dustpan, and when the task was done, the simple fall of the mess into the bin, condensed and contained. When they left, Sam, cheeks blossoming red, stuffed a tenner into her tip jar. 

From then on they always tried to be more self-aware when in public, and their tips to the girl, whose name they had learned was Carine, and who, being such a constant in their lives, would become over the course of the following months a friend to them, doubled and tripled depending on the amount of mess they had made and the depth of their wallets on that particular day: their efforts were further galvanised by the discovery that she was saving for a deposit on a flat of her own, after they had goaded her one morning to tell them more about herself. 

This small problem solved by an act of kindness was indicative of the nature of their lives now. They were blundering through, each comforted by the knowledge that no mistake they would make on accident could possibly drive the other away, and the tenderness they felt toward each other seeping through to the rest of the world so that everything had a rose-tinted hue.

Some weekends they would meet Anthony, Lulu, Kate, Melody and Colin for a curry night (one that was typically much less stressful than their first) and revel in the memory of their time in the hospital, which for all of them had marked a fundamental change in the way they went about their everyday lives. 

When Sam first stood up on a sofa in Melody’s new flat and announced their relationship, Fred had been overwhelmed by the glee with which they responded; Melody grabbing Colin and cheering, Kate raising her glass, her smile free for once of anguish, Lulu jumping up and ruffling Sam’s hair and saying “I knew you’d figure it out eventually.” This eventuality with which their friends regarded their relationship was a comfort to Fred.

At these dinners Fred would wilfully ignore any awkwardness between Kate, Anthony and Lulu, even when they would have a particularly tense conversation and Sam’s eyes implored him to point out the obvious. Fred knew that certain things were out of his control. Lulu would crack a joke about how strange it was that a white guy could make better curries than an actual Indian, and Fred would laugh along, the atmosphere lightened and the tension broken once more. 

When the curry nights were over and the weather was balmy (as it often was in London) Sam and Fred would walk, rather than taking the tube, the forty-minute walk, sometimes arm in arm, sometimes swaying away from each other, Sam sometimes skipping ahead performatively, acting out some story from earlier in the night while Fred’s cheeks started to ache from smiling constantly so hard. Fred reckoned he must have the strongest cheeks in the city with the amount he smiled.

About six months after the hospital, Sam decided to dye his blonde tips a garish magenta. It was a mystery how he maintained them in the first place since Fred could not recall a time when he had gone to the salon and there were no bottles of bleach behind their bathroom mirror. This time though, they did it together: Fred’s gloved hands massaging the purple lather into Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes pressing shut at the sensation. Sam smiled shyly at him as he sat, dye setting in underneath a plastic shower-cap that looked like it didn’t belong on his head. The artificial light caught his face in a sheer band across his cheekbones, making his smile as they chatted expectantly about what the result would look like all the more charming. 

After they had rinsed the dye off in a fuchsia flood that pooled in the bottom of their shower-bath, Sam tousled his hair rapidly and wildly, a familiar conspiratorial look flashing across his eyes as he turned to face Fred. He was happy. They were happy. 

While Sam was admiring himself in the mirror again before they went to bed Fred laid an old towel across their pillows to stop the dye from staining them. He clambered between the sheets, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth at the look of utter astonishment on Sam’s face as he pulled the wave of his hair to and from mouth agape. Sam caught sight of him in the mirror and his innocent beam quickly became a dirty smirk, turning on his heel and launching himself with surprising force at the bed, landing half on Fred and causing them both to groan. 

As they half-recoiled from the impact of the crash, half adjusted their positions to be more comfortable, Fred placed a finger on Sam’s chin, awestruck still by the ease with which Sam turned to him, and the effortlessness of the act of pressing their lips together. Fred’s body, as if by magic, drew closer to Sam’s as they melted together, tongues attentively, almost conversationally meeting and withdrawing. Fred broke the kiss only momentarily, both of them smiling against each other, foreheads pressed together, while Fred threw a leg over Sam’s body.

They rocked together, thumbing eagerly at each other’s waistbands, knowing what would come next, pulses racing with anticipation.

The next morning Fred awoke to a purple stain on his shoulder in the shadow of Sam’s head. The offender was angelically asleep, the insidious little prince, but Fred could not bring himself to rouse him. If this was the rest of his life, he thought, he would be happy.

For the last few months he couldn’t shake the feeling that he ought to be scared that he was breaking from his routine, but now he knew that the reason he wasn’t was that deep down he knew that this would happen. He had known all along.

**Author's Note:**

> i love these boys and in my personal opinion they go back to the hospital and have their wedding ceremony there
> 
> thank you so much for reading this fic was written for sofie @gayingenue on tumblr and fellow crashing uk warrior, happy birthday queen <333
> 
> if you are one of the probably like 20 people in the world that watched crashing come yell with me on tumblr where i am @dykerichietozier


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